


Listen to the Shadows Falling

by isoladea



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M, Post-Divorce, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-15
Updated: 2011-10-15
Packaged: 2017-10-24 15:35:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoladea/pseuds/isoladea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nocturne No. 2 in E Flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2 was a tragedy.  It would take years before Charles could listen to Chopin again, years and years and death.  Erik's last attempt in keeping Charles alive would haunt the latter to his grave: "You are not supposed to listen to Chopin alone."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Listen to the Shadows Falling

**Author's Note:**

> Soundtrack: 'Nocturne No. 2 in E Flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2' by Frederic Chopin, as performed by Ivan Moravec.

A quiet cry under the shadow of the domed ceiling and its ghostly gossamer cobwebs: “I can’t live without you.”

He slumped forward in his wheelchair, fisting clumps of his hair, tight and painful — he had gone so long without his hair, and his first instinct was to rip them off his scalp, from the roots to the tips, and to let himself bleed. He would bleed to death, if only that had been what was needed, what all there was to it.

The firm touch of callused hands pried his fingers away, not forcibly, but certainly without his will or consent. “You’ll survive,” Erik said, and it sounded like an order or a statement, with too much conviction than what Charles was comfortable with. The second time he said it, it was clearly a mandate: “You’ll survive.”

Brittle and embittered, he glared at Erik. “How will you know?”

Erik’s tone was sharp, all edge and hardness, almost admonishing. “I won’t,” he snapped. Charles very nearly flinched; he had been trembling so hard that the gesture would not register either way. Catching Charles’ chin in his grip, Erik mercilessly tipped his head up. They were face to face: the hard, angry determination on Erik’s vulpine jaw and the devastated fury in Charles’ wide eyes. Rubbing a thumb on Charles’ cold cheek, he murmured, “But you will, because I _want_ you to do so. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes,” he spat out, and wrenched his face away from Erik, his expression retreating behind the shadow of his brown locks.

Turning on his heels, Erik left him in that position: broken and leaning in his seat. Erik’s loafers printed new, clean tracks on the layer of grey dusting the floorboards. Between the dustsheets curtaining the expanses of grimy windows and the dim chandelier swaying from the apex of the great dome, his figure cast a long, slender shadow that was unsettlingly deep.

In the centre of the room stood an unrecognisable structure, blanketed by a swath of dustsheet the colour of dust itself. The corners of the cloth were rotting away. This Erik took and ripped off in one smooth movement, as one might unfurl a cape. Dust clouds bloomed forth, scattering the amber lighting. The sheet pooled into itself around Erik’s ankles, abandoned to decay on the hard floor.

On a circular table stood a gramophone, its brass trumpet a gilded flower even under the dying embers of a far away chandelier. Running his hand over its cool surface, Erik smiled and asked, “What do you have in mind?”

“In my mind, old friend,” Charles replied quietly, choking on the bitter taste on his tongue, “in my mind, there is you.”

“Loyal to fault.” There was a fondness in his voice, a note of affection. He kept his gaze trained at the gramophone as the needle lifted itself slowly, in a dignified path through the air, before settling snug and silent on the groove of the disk. The disk began to rotate, and with its spin were the first echoing notes of Chopin. Delighted, he murmured, “Ah, nocturne. E flat major.”

“It’s not mine,” Charles sighed, pressing the heel of his hand to his damp eyes. “It’s yours, my friend.”

Pursing his lips, Erik turned his back towards the music and jerked his chin towards their surroundings. “Are these all mine, too, Charles?”

He glanced at the peeling wallpaper, the crooked frames that displayed the putrefaction of canvases, the moth-eaten curtains, and the windows covered in age and the thick rot of blankets. “No,” he keened. There were bursts of blood coming from the direction of his heart: it was less of his heart beating than bleeding. “This sorry state of affairs is my fault. It’s all my fault.”

Even though both of them looked younger than their age — they appeared to be in their thirties and Time seemed to have rewound itself back to the nineteen sixties, Erik’s sigh sounded forever too young, with a depth and passion that could never survive growing up. “Charles,” he sighed. Then he turned his face towards the bare floor. He shook his head, slowly. “Charles. There is nothing to forgive.”

 _Crescendo_ : the silence between them crashed as waves might upon thorny rocks, foaming white and wild, even as the piano soared forth and beyond.

“Dance with me,” Erik said. It was an order, but the tremulous notes of his voice spoke of an underlying hope, of a permission for rejection, and of an entrenched sorrow should the rejection come to pass.

Charles gazed upon the offered hand, a room’s breadth away. He gave a shaky laugh, made up of nerves and butterflies, and a wrenching of the heart. “Of all things, Erik,” he mused, but he planted his feet on the ground, nonetheless. In adagio, he gently eased his body out of the embrace of the chair and carefully pulled his posture upright, standing up.

Erik’s mouth tugged into a crooked, genuine smile. “One dance, _Herr Xavier_.”

“Should it not be the last,” Charles chuckled; the words, however, were devoid of mirth — they simply rang hollow. Erik cocked his head, as if contemplating, and said nothing.

Breathing fast and deep, Charles walked towards him.

There were shadows falling upon his shoulders, fragile winged creatures dawning upon his person. When he moved to brush them away, he realised that they were cobwebs: it was raining dust silk from the dark dome of the sky. Then Erik bowed upon his hand and pressed a fleeting kiss onto his knuckles, a touch reminiscent of a shadow — it would haunt him long after it was gone. “ _Herr Xavier_.”

His voice seemed to have abandoned him, or something had entrapped his throat. “ _Herr Lehnsherr_.”

Eyes boring into his eyes, smile crooked and cruel and careful, Erik Lehnsherr claimed and did not ask: “May I have this dance.”

 

XXX

 

When Charles first heard of the news, it did not surprise him, but it broke his heart, nonetheless. It did not even lessen the pain. He crumbled in front of Erik, in front of the omnipresent guards, within the plastic confines of the cell. He folded upon himself and pressed his face onto Erik’s knee. Then he gave a long keen — drawn-out, it seemed, from a pain he did not know he was capable of — that reverberated in the minds of all who were present to witness the scene.

 _(“Will you miss me, Charles?” Erik murmured, close to the lobe of his ear, breath cool and damp on his skin. The vibrato in his voice matched a short burst of trills on a faraway keyboard’s once ivory keys._

 _Charles pressed deeper into Erik’s hold, and the man’s grip on him tightened. “When I heard the verdict,” he whispered, “I cried.”_

 _“No,” Erik said, “it was the prison guards who cried.” He thought of the dry fabric on the knee of his prison uniform, the unblemished white, and Charles’ pale, ashen face._

 _Erik released him, Charles spun, and in an inhalation they were back together, pressed and close and nothing, it seemed, would dare to come between them. Resting his chin on Erik’s bony shoulder, Charles said, “I made them cry for me.”)_

“They can’t,” Charles sobbed, but his cheeks remained painfully dry. “They can’t do this.”

“Charles—,” Erik’s voice was strained, and he cupped his old friend’s head in his wrinkled hands. “They have always done this. I do not know why they will not do so now.”

When Charles raised his head, his blue eyes were scorched ablaze. “They can’t do this to me,” he hissed.

 _(Don’t go, said Charles, when the music paused as Erik closed his eyes and the needle straightened itself. On the renewed melody, he repeated it: don’t go._

 _Then Erik told him that he would survive.)_

 

XXX

 

Charles tried to ignore the sharp flashes of light, the gleaming camera lenses, and the clamour of the voices and the thoughts by closing his eyes. When he opened them again, they were wide and blue and clear, like deep waters, like aquatic mirrors. “If the government does decide on the execution of Magneto,” he said, “I will never forgive them for murdering Erik Lehnsherr.”

“You spent half of your lives trying to kill each other,” a young woman pointed out, jabbing the air with her pen.

 _(“I love you walking,” Erik told him, tucking a stray strand of brown hair behind his ear. “I love you with your hair.”_

 _“You put me on that wheelchair,” Charles reminded him, straightening the collar of his polo shirt, running his fingertips down his bare arms, circling the numbers imprinted on his skin. “You made me lose my hair when I grieved over you. You and Raven.”_

 _Erik pressed a dry kiss on his forehead. They swayed in the gentle ebb and flow of the nocturne. “That is for me to regret,” he said, “for me to not to forgive myself.”_

 _The notes danced a complicated turn of triplets and quavers. They answered not to the music, but to the heartbeats of the other. “I love you happy,” Erik told him, achingly sincere, and it sounded too much like a confession that Charles leaned in to kiss him on the lips.)_

Charles pursed his lips in the way he knew Erik did whenever the latter was displeased. “That,” he said dryly, “is only a matter of principle.”

 

XXX

 

Glancing at the guards, Erik leaned into Charles’ crumpled form and whispered, “Do we have the time, old friend, for some privacy and music?”

Charles had to be half mad with grief, grief for someone who had not passed away, because knowing the face of Death in the eyes of a beloved was infinitely harder than confronting Him face to face. The guards shifted uneasily in their posts by the doorway. Pursing his lips, Charles murmured, “What do you have in mind?”

Erik never told him.

Erik gave him his mind instead.

 

XXX

 

The last handful of notes did not fade into the cottony silence pending the next repeat; they shattered into a thousand fragments that screeched.

Flickering back and forth was the image of Erik and Magneto — a metal-manipulator in his thirties and a prisoner deprived of his youth and powers. Charles reached out his hand to touch the bifurcating identities; he would be happy to be able to touch any of them.

“Ah,” Erik and Magneto exclaimed softly, “it seems that they are taking me away while you are – occupied, my friend.”

“No,” Charles pleaded, and his consciousness flickered between the sleeping form of Magneto being carried away by the guards and Erik, smiling and awake and bright and beautiful, in his arms. “I have to go back; I need to. Unhand me, Erik. I need to keep you alive.”

Pressing hard, bruising kisses along the column of his neck, Erik spoke into his skin: “Promise me you’ll survive.”

The cobwebs descended in a grey downpour. A cold draft stirred the static dusts entrapped between the sheets, and they began to cling onto Erik’s form, smudging him into the shadows, covering him with fingers of fine grey.

“No.” He was crying in earnest, a wet downpour — no more borrowing other men’s eyes and tears. He let them well forth and dampen the front of Erik’s shirt. “No. I can’t—“

 _Forte:_ the music crested and threatened to spill and fragment into dust. There were frantic kisses, nearly all teeth and too little lips, more of grasping at time than remembering love. Because whatever time they had had, there was no more to be had, not even for love. “Promise me,” Erik said, harsh and hard, “promise me that you will. Do it for me, _Liebling_.”

Clutching on the fabric of Erik’s shirt, he shook his head and, broken and stuck in a feedback loop, repeated all over again, “No, no, no, I can’t…”

Erik’s eyes burnt him, but there was forgiveness there, a certain understanding. He opened his mouth, choked on the first incomprehensible syllable, and then a jerk seemed to reverberate from his bones, a wrenching of the heart. In a spasm, he held Charles close, closer than he would ever wish again, closer than he would ever dream again. Then the greyness claimed him and he was too far for Charles to reach or touch or kiss. In the background, ivory notes tumbled and shattered, like glass marbles, into fine dust; the needle broke into the groove and cracked into splinters.

But the dream did not come to an end. Between the void in the plastic cell and the decay of the ballroom, Charles folded upon himself, like a flower blooming in reverse, turning its head from life, bowing its head in grief. There were cobwebs occupying the wheelchair, like grey corals on a shipwreck. They encroached his body. They fell in a downpour from a domed sky.

 _(Erik’s heartbeat was synchronised with the thrum of the music. “After this,” Charles mused, “I won’t be able to listen to Chopin anymore. Not all alone.”_

 _There was a frown on Erik’s brows. He pressed his nose into Charles hair and murmured, “You are not supposed to listen to Chopin alone.”_

 _Threading his fingers through the brown strands, he combed the sticky cobwebs away, slowly revealing the original sheen, the chocolate gleam of Charles’ head. “The nocturnes can drag you away,” he said, humming with the music. “They coax you from your mooring. Before you know it, you are going with their ebb and flow, and then you are simply another victim for marooning.”_

 _The needle was gliding towards the end of the last clutch of notes. Breathing in the dust, with cobweb in his eyes, Charles murmured, “Like listening to the shadows falling.”)_

Even though the black disk was burnt through, the needle broken and sharp and hidden under the dusk and between the floorboards, even though Chopin was gone and Erik Lehnsherr and Magneto were gone, Charles could hear them still: the reverberations in the mind, echoes of the last clutch of notes on ivory, glass marbles rolling to the edge of the table to collapse into fine dust.

The shadows did fall. He listened to them falling like rain.

 


End file.
